Thursday, January 3, 2013

Just Bwause 2 (Warning: Math Involved)

So after making various claims about the size of Panau in previous bwogs, I decided to actually try and math it out. Now my degree is in studio art - well known to be the polar opposite of mathematics in nearly every conceivable way - but if I can cram enough video game into the equation sometimes I can survive a little bit of algebra. Let's see how I did...I flew a plane (a Peek Airhawk 225, decidedly not the fastest aircraft available) from the far Southeast of Panau to the far Northwest. I'm going to consider these to be the extreme distances in either direction but I know they're not, and I'm going to round the distance traveled to 40km (you can see on the left that it's a little more). I'm also going to mention that this wasn't technically a straight line since I had to adjust altitude and bearing fairly often by minor amounts, but we're going to disregard that as well. It took, conservatively, ten minutes and thirty seconds (that's 630 seconds or .175 hours). So our math looks like this:40km/.175hrs or 228.5km/hr for the speed of the plane (which is, of course, faster than Scorpio's running speed but we didn't test that so this is mostly arbitrary warm-ups for more complicated equations that we might just give up on anyway)Let's just say, as an off the cuff guesstimate, that Scorpio runs a third as fast as the plane. I have no data to support this hypothesis because I spent so much time making that image in GIMP but what's my degree in again? That's right. So if Scorpio runs a third as fast as the plane flies that means it would take him more than thirty minutes to run from one corner of the game map to its opposite - if he ran in a relatively straight and flat path, which is simply not possible. Aside from all the water, Panau has some impressive mountains... and military personnel armed with machine guns and unlimited numbers of jeeps that they drive like toddlers when alerted to your presence as an Agent of Chaos. Suffice it to say, bullets travel in straight lines and so Scorpio does not.So what did we learn from all this? Well, I don't know. I played the junk out of Morrowind back in the day and I seem to recall someone saying they crossed Vvardenfell in about twenty minutes. I don't know if they were using levitation or not and I don't care anymore really - just know that when I say "Panau is really big and you should play this game," I mean it. Twenty years of gaming experience and four years of a studio art degree from a state school lead us to no other conclusion.With Brightest of (Distantly Rendered and Yet Somehow Reachable) Greens,BWP.S.I should add that the more astute observers of you may notice that the map didn't add the little arrow to show my location. I'm not sure why and I didn't notice until afterwards, but you can tell where I'm at from the picture on the left. Good eye, Columbo!